Mike is a retired stock broker, and now published author of Gold Rush!. In addition, he is a freelance writer specializing in real estate, personal finance and home decor now writing from San Miguel, Mexico.

Taxes

Just another form of confiscation, taxation plunders the hard work and talent of the citizenry. But thanks to decades of brainwashing, itâ€™s more socially acceptable. Weâ€™ve come to regard taxes as a â€˜necessary evil,â€™ not realizing that the country existed for decades, even centuries, without an income tax.

Yet when bankrupt governments get desperate enough, they begin imposing new taxesâ€¦ primarily WEALTH taxes (Argentina) or windfall profits taxes (United States in the 1970s).

Inflation

This is indirect confiscationâ€“ the slow, gradual plundering of peopleâ€™s savings. Again, governments have been quite successful at inculcating a belief that inflation is also a necessary evil. Theyâ€™re also adept at fooling people with phony inflation statistics.

Capital Controls

Governments can, do, and will restrict the free-flow of capital across borders. Theyâ€™ll prevent you from moving your own money to a safer jurisdiction, forcing you to keep your hard earned savings at home where it can be plundered and devalued.

Weâ€™re seeing this everywhere in the developed worldâ€¦ from withdrawal limits in Europe to cash-sniffing dogs at border checkpoints. And it certainly doesnâ€™t help when everyone from the IMF to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argue in favor of Capital Controls.

Wage and Price controls

When even the lowest common denominator in society realizes that prices are getting higher, governments step in and â€˜fixâ€™ things by imposing price controls.

Occasionally this also includes wage controlsâ€¦ though wage increases tend to be vastly outpaced by price increases.

Of course, as any basic economics textbook can illustrate, price controls never work and typically lead to shortages and massive misallocations.

Wage and Price controlsâ€“ on STEROIDS

When the first round of price controls donâ€™t work, the next step is to impose severe penalties for not abiding by the terms.

In the days of Diocletianâ€™s Edict on Prices in the 4th century AD, any Roman caught violating the price controls was put to death.

In post-revolutionary France, shopkeepers who violated the â€œLaw of Maximumâ€ were fleeced of their private propertyâ€¦ and a national spy system was put into place to enforce the measures.

Increased regulation

Despite being completely broke, governments will dramatically expand their ranks in a last desperate gasp to envelop the problem in sheer size.

In the early 1920s, for example, the number of bureaucratic officials in the Weimar Republic increased 242%, even though the country was flat broke from its Great War reparation payments and hyperinflation episode.

The increase in both regulations and government officials criminalizes and/or controls almost every aspect of our existenceâ€¦ from what we can/cannot put in our bodies to how we are allowed to raise our own children.

War and National Emergency

When all else fails, just invade another country. Pick a fight. Keep people distracted by work them into a frenzy over men in cavesâ€¦ or some completely irrelevant island.